Friday, 3 June 2016

Have To Make Their Way

Iraqis breaking up into competing centres of power and truck
drivers are among those who can best describe the miseries of trying to travel
from one fragment of the country to another.

“Our life is horrible,” says
Mohammed Oday, a driver sitting with seven or eight others in the shade of a
road bridge beside a parking lot filled with trucks on the outskirts of the oil
city of Kirkuk.

All the drivers bar one were
Sunni Arabs from Ramadiin Anbar province, a city that was 80
per cent destroyed by US air strikes and Iraqi army artillery when they
besieged it last year.

“One room in my house is not as badly damaged as the
others, so maybe my family could live in it,” said one of the drivers, but he
added that there was not much chance of this happening because the road to
Anbar is too dangerous.

The furthest west he and the
other truckers dared go on the road to Anbar was a checkpoint called Bzeybiz
beyond which the road is controlled by much-feared Shia paramilitaries like
Ketaeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq.

“They question us to see if we have
Sunni names like Baqr, Othman, Omar or Muawiya,” says Mr Oday.

“And, if they
don’t arrest us, they charge between $800 (£555) and $1,000 per truck to let us
through.”

Levying charges on vehicles passing through the frequent
checkpoints on the roads is one of Iraq’s most remunerative rackets.

Nothing
moves without paying up and a good security reason can always be given for
imposing endless delays while the real purpose is to extract the maximum bribe.

Police and army officers pay heavily to be given charge of checkpoints on
well-used routes and paramilitary groups use them as a regular source of
revenue.

The drivers in Kirkuk spoke of paying $500 at smaller checkpoints or
up to $5,000 if they are carrying perishable goods like chicken or eggs to the
markets in Baghdad.

“It is not we drivers who pay the
bribes but whoever owns the goods we are carrying,” said one the drivers, only
a few of whom own their own trucks.

“Then the owner adds the cost of the
pay-offs to the price of goods when they are sold in the shops or the markets
in Baghdad.”

They agree that this helps
explain why everything for sale in Iraq is so expensive, with a frozen chicken
that costs $1 in Turkey costing $4 in Iraq and a pair of jeans made in a
Turkish factory for $4 or $5 being sold in Irbil for $40.

Iraq produces almost
nothing itself apart from oil and gas, so everything needed by 33 million
Iraqis has to be imported by road. Even the tomatoes sold in street stalls in
Baghdad come from Iran.

Mr Ali’s journey illustrates the extraordinary
difficulties and dangers Iraqis face moving quite short distances within their
own country.

Unemployed in Mosul after it was captured by Isis in 2014, he went
first to Syria, then to Turkey and finally to Irbil in the Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG) area where he was arrested to make sure he was not an Isis
agent.

Cleared of this, Mr Ali was sent
to Kirkuk, which is controlled by Kurds but outside the KRG and told not to
come back.

This restriction limits his ability to earn a living because he
cannot pass through the KRG to pick up goods from Turkey.

“I wish I had
stayed in Mosul despite Daesh [Isis],” he says bitterly. “At least then I would
be able to see my wife and children.”

The life of these drivers is hard
when they are working and harder still when they are not, because it is too
dangerous for them to return to their homes.

“Where are you living?” we asked
and they replied in chorus: “Under this bridge. This is our address.”

Up to
four months ago they got the occasional load to take to Basra in the far south
in Iraq, but this is no longer happening, probably because of the cost of
bribing checkpoints or the danger of being identified as a Sunni in Shia
provinces.

Trucking companies frequently switch between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish
drivers so they will be driving through an area where their own community is in
control.

The degree of danger for drivers
varies greatly from one part of Iraq to another.

For instance, a businessman
involved in the freight forwarding business in Baghdad, who wished to remain
anonymous, says that it costs about $7,000 in bribes to get a truck to al-Asad
air base in Anbar province where US troops are stationed alongside the Iraqi
army.

The fees are often paid in advance through an
intermediary in return for an unofficial permit and they increase the closer
the vehicle gets to the base.

He says that each of the big Shia paramilitary
groups have their own territory, usually retaken from Isis, in which they can
extract illicit revenues from the transport industry or through kidnapping
individuals: Ketaeb Hezbollah dominates in eastern Anbar, Asaib Ahl al-Haq on
the Samarra to Tikrit road and Badr in Diyala province to the north-east of
Baghdad.

The drivers are angry at having
to live a life in which they are at the mercy of predatory and sectarian
checkpoints that treat them with contempt.

“We are back to the Stone Age,” says
Mohammed Oday, describing how he sleeps on the open ground or in his truck,
cannot go back to Ramadi or drive through Isis-held areas.

They probably thought that
anything to do with Isis was too dangerous to talk about, though Mustafa Ali
said that “we live between two hells: Daesh accuses us of being apostates and
the government suspects that we are Daesh terrorists”.

Iraq and Syria are both infested with checkpoints that
are meant to provide security and detect Isis suicide bombers, but in practice
this seldom happens.

One reason may be that those manning the checkpoint are
well aware that if they do detect a suicide bomber he will blow himself up
immediately and they will be killed.

But another reason why the bombers get through so easily
is that that those manning checkpoints see them primarily as a way of making
money and an Isis bomber who pays a small sum will be waved through without
being searched.

“They must have bribed their way through a checkpoint,” an
intelligence official in Baghdad told The
Independent in February when dozens of Isis gunmen and bombers
launched a fierce attack at Abu Ghraib.

Long columns of stationary
trucks, often stretching for miles, have been a frequent sight on Iraqi roads
for years.

The reason may be elaborate security checks or the Turkish border
being closed or some more complicated reason, though a common feature of these
stoppages is that those responsible for them do not care what happens to the
drivers.

The drivers accept these bribes as more like customs
tariffs that are an inevitable fact of life, but they are angered by the
extraordinary length of time they may have to wait – up to a month – to get
through checkpoints where they should stay only a few minutes.

They complain
they are continually mistreated by officials and there is nothing they can do
about it.

“An officer killed a driver who lost his temper at a checkpoint on the
road into Baghdad,” says Mustafa Ali, a driver who came from Mosul two years
ago.

Last week I drove past a
five-mile long immobile line of well over a thousand trucks loaded with sacks
of grain outside of the town of Makhmour west of Irbil.

I was surprised because
I did not know that the KRG produced so much grain and in this I may have been
right.

Further enquiries revealed that Kurdish farmers were eager to get their
heavily subsidised grain to a Baghdad government controlled silo near Makhmour
and get paid.

But the federal ministry of trade was causing delays because it
suspects the farmers are engaged in a massive scam at its expense.

he ministry pays three times the
market price for the grain so the KRG farmers purchase cheap grain from Iran
and Turkey and sell it to the state at the inflated subsidised price as their
own production.

The ministry is in future going to insist on more documentation
to show where the grain really comes from, so the farmers are eager to off-load
all the foreign grain they have imported while they still can.

Iraq is unlikely to disintegrate because all parts of the
country are too dependent on the oil revenues from the oil fields concentrated
in the southern provinces around Basra.

Outside powers, who have done so much
to weaken the central state by supporting their chosen proxies, do not want
Iraq to formally cease to exist.

Its break-up would not be
bloodless, but would be more like the Partition of India in 1947.

To a
substantial degree this is already happening, and three million Iraqis have
already been displaced from their homes.

Communities under threat have
responded to danger by consolidating their control over a compact piece of
territory and evicting everyone else.

South of Kirkuk, in Tuz Khurmatu,
the Kurds and the Shia Turkman have split the town down the middle and neither
side ventures into the others’ domain.

Even street cleaners working for the
municipality have to come from the right sect and ethnicity.

It is one more
tricky disputed area through which Iraqi truck drivers will have to make their
way.